IN MEMORY OF COMRADE PROSHYAN

Published:First published inPravdaNo. 277, December 20, 1918.

      Printed from thePravdatext.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1971,

      Moscow,Volume 36,

      pages497-498.Translated:Andrew RothsteinTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive.You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.•README

Ibecame acquainted with Comrade Proshyan and learned
to value his co-operation during our work together in
the Council of People’s Commissars, at the end of last
year and the beginning of the present year, when the Left
S.R.s were in alliance with us. Proshyan stood out for
his deep devotion to the revolution and tosocialism. It
could not be said of all the Left S.R.s that they were
socialists, and this could even hardly be said of most of them.
But this had to be said about Proshyan, because, in spite
of his loyalty to the ideology of the Russian Narodniks,
a non-socialist ideology, you saw in Proshyan a deeply
convinced socialist. In his own way, not through Marxism,
not starting with the idea of the class struggle of the
proletariat, did this man become a socialist; and I was able
to observe more than once, when working together with
him in the Council of People’s Commissars, how Comrade
Proshyan would resolutely side with the Bolsheviks, the
Communists, against his fellow Left Socialist–
Revolutionaries, when they expressed the standpoint of the petty
proprietors and took a negative attitude to communist measures
in the sphere of agriculture.

Iparticularly recall a conversation with Comrade
Proshyan not long before the Brest peace. It seemed then that
there no longer remained any substantial differences
between us. Proshyan began speaking to me about the need
for our parties to amalgamate, saying that the Left S.R.s
most remote from communism (at that time, the word
was not yet commonly used) had noticeably, and very
strongly, drawn closer to it during the period of our work
together in the Council of People’s Commissars. I was reservedas regards Proshyan’s proposal, and called it premature,
but did not at all deny that we had come closer in our
practical work.

TheBrest peace brought about a complete divergence,
and from divergence, given Proshyan’s revolutionary
consistency and convictions, there could not but develop direct,
even armed struggle. I must admit I did not in any way
expect matters to go as far as an insurrection, or such facts
as the betrayal of Commander-in-Chief Muravyov, a Left
S.R. But the example of Proshyan revealed how deep the
roots ofpatriotismwere even in the most sincere and
convinced socialists from among the Left S.R.s, how differences
in the general principles underlying men’s world views
had inevitably shown themselves at a difficult
turning-point in history. The subjectivism of the Narodniks led
to a fatal error on the part of even the best of them, who
let themselves be blinded by the spectre of monstrous
strength, that of German imperialism. Any other struggle
against that imperialism except an insurrectionary one,
and moreover immediately, that very minute, without any
consideration of the objective conditions of the
international situation and our own, seemed in the light of a
revolutionary’s duty absolutely intolerable. It was the effect
of the very same mistake which in 1907 made the
Socialist-Revolutionaries unconditionally “boycott” the Stolypin
Duma. But in the circumstances of hot revolutionary
battles the error took a more cruel revenge, and pushed
Proshyan on to the path of armed struggle against the Soviet
power.

Neverthelessup to July 1918 Proshyan succeeded in
doing more to strengthen the Soviet power than he did
after July 1918 to undermine it. And in the international
situation created after the German revolution, a new
approach by Proshyan to communism—a firmer one than
before—would have been inevitable but for his untimely
death.